As I’ve mentioned on the blog previously, my work schedule is skewed towards the school holidays. As such, with July ending it’s all hands on deck (well, both hands anyway) as I have to navigate the madness that is my diary in August.

Steady Eddie

This year, to try to avoid attempting too many things simultaneously, I took the decision to take a break from Lyme Runners. Whilst this might have been unthinkable a few years ago, I have a team of very competent run leaders who can make sure everything works smoothly. And whilst I could be up at 5am to get many of my morning jobs bottomed out before rushing up to Lyme to lead the group and then rush off again to continue with my work day, it’s not really benefiting anyone. Coupled with the fact that my heel has not responded well to the terrain in Lyme taking a break seems to make the most sense. Something that was probably obvious to the rest of the world and it was just my stubbornness, coupled with an unhealthy dose of perfectionism driving me to feeling I need to be doing everything, all the time, in order not to let anyone down.

It’s only taken me this long to work this out…….

As it happens, in the first week of runs I’m going to cover we were down two leaders so I really did need to be present in order to make sure we maintained the recommended ratio of run leaders to participants. Whilst some groups might be a bit more lackadaisical I’ve always felt it important to have enough competent pairs of hands when taking people out on the trails. I don’t expect there to ever be a problem, but should one arise, it’s important that it can be dealt with so everyone is looked after properly.

A week (that might have included more trail than planned)

So with that in mind, over the two Lyme trail runs I recorded 9.5 miles. However I’d managed to stop my watch whilst waiting for a regroup and promptly forgot to restart it. So the total was probably more like 11 trail miles! Not that it matters, these runs, at least from my training point of view, are low heart rate base and hill runs. Although this provides cardiovascular benefits, I don’t think my foot necessarily shared that enthusiasm!

The session with Marple Runners was much less of an issue as I was observing a coached session which was a dry-run for their upcoming assessment. Aside from the supporting role I do love watching how other coaches organise their sessions. It’s very easy to get into a rut in terms of how we do things, and so seeing another person’s take on a topic, or how they tackle something different is very interesting. When I did my qualification back in 2017 it was before I was involved in any clubs and I really flew blind; sure you can get ideas from online sources, but it makes such a difference to experience things first hand and see how they go. An idea might look great on paper, but doesn’t necessarily work as anticipated in practice. Hence I like to make sure that newly qualified (or to be qualified) coaches get a dry run so they can tweak their plans if they don’t quite work as they thought.

A bit of a digression, but I thought it worth discussion.

Back to my own staggering around, well I was very much limited to the flat of pavements and an old railway route which is now a flat bridleway. With work in full swing, my runs fall into two categories:

1. Running to and from some of the jobs – a run-commute
2. Specific training session

In previous times, I could be doing run commutes of 15-20 miles but my current fitness limits that significantly to about 5-10km. But it can be a way to reduce the amount of miles in the car. And the amount of time sat stationary in the car in the many roadworks that are rolled out as soon as the schools have emptied out for another half-term. In addition to this, I’ll cycle quite a few afternoon jobs for the same reason. And it’s cross-training which hopefully will benefit the overall fitness progress.

I did two “training” runs in addition to the above trail miles, totalling just under 12 miles. The first was a low HR run-commute of about 5 miles. For the second run, Garmin wanted some sort of sprint session which I decided against. Instead I did a favourite workout of 5x 1km at roughly 5km race pace. Not that I know what this is now, but I do know that it ended up being roughly what my old HM pace used to be. That stung a bit!! But I managed the session and nothing fell off. So I’ll take it as a win overall.

Total weekly mileage = 21.5 miles

A week (that didn’t contain much trail)

One of the bit drawbacks I find trying to follow a plan designed by Garmin is that we have a disagreement about my sleep. Most nights, Garmin tells me that my sleep is rubbish. And as a result tends to scale back the sessions it suggests to being short recovery runs. The problem is that this is my normal sleep. Whether or not it’s good from an analytical point of view is academic given that I’m used to it. In fact most of the time I think I’ve slept OK only to wake to a finger-wagging message from the Garmin Daily Report screen.

With no runs to actually lead this week, all four runs that I took were “for me”. Despite my annoyance with the whole sleep thing, I have made a point of really focusing on the slower paced runs. I can’t quite do the magic I want to do in a Z2 heart rate (although without actually doing some proper tests, my HR zones aren’t entirely confirmed). But I seem to be able to hold things together quite nicely at roughly 130bpm; this is based upon running to set paces on the watch, so it seems like a reasonable place to start. Hence that’s my focus when I’m not following a particular workout plan (which are set on paces).

I was meeting Marple Runners to assist with another coached session (that I wasn’t organising myself) but having got stuck in traffic and at various jobs was running very late. I had hoped to run into Marple but as I hadn’t managed to leave home before the session was supposed to start, I had to drive instead.

Despite knowing the session plan (hill running techniques) I initially couldn’t find the group who were somewhere in Brabyns Park. So I did a loop of the park (easy pace), ran up and down a few possible hills and a bit of back and forth before finding them. The session did involve some hill repeats which I took part in, and following the session went and did another loop of the park, at easy pace again. Another really good session in itself although my own “training” run was a bit of a mish-mash, although I rounded it all into a 5 mile total distance. It’s also the closest I’ve been to a parkrun route in a couple of years!

My Tuesday run, which wasn’t at Lyme, was a run-commute. 8 miles total at an easy-ish pace – rather than 9 min/miles, it was more like 8.40 min/miles but trying to retain that 130ish bmp heart rate throughout. Not entirely successfully, but with an overall average HR of 133bpm it wasn’t a disaster.

Come Thursday I needed to get out and do something, but with Garmin moaning at me for being incapable of sleeping “the Garmin way” I stuck to its plan and did a 30 minute recovery run. Rather than worrying about pace, I tried to keep my HR in Z2 and made a pretty good job of it. So 3 miles in 30 minutes at 122bpm average.

The final run of the week, on Friday was somewhat unfocused. I had a job I needed to get to which was much easier to do via run or bike. I’d done it on bike several times during the week and felt I needed to get another run in. What made it more of a challenge was a strong breeze blowing along the bypass. Resistance training. Yay! I realised that with this extra element that the training effect might be a bit skewed as the pace would be slower in one direction for the same amount of effort as it was an out and back route. In the end Garmin decided that it was a “threshold run” which had a “productive” effect on my fitness. But aside from it adding 7.5 miles to my weekly total, it was hard to get much sense out of the data!

Total weekly mileage = 23.1 miles.